


days die young when you're gone

by okayantigone



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Force Magic, Gen, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-02
Updated: 2018-01-02
Packaged: 2019-02-27 11:51:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,367
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13247655
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/okayantigone/pseuds/okayantigone
Summary: Her son looks at her in the backdrop of the dream's sunset. She realizes it isn't a sunset at all. It is the single suspended moment before the Death Star hits it's target."You owe me a lifetime."She wakes up drenched in cold sweat, alone in her quarters, and she will never seen her son again. She hasn't seen him he was a child.Or the one where Kylo uses some Force magic to talk to his mother.





	days die young when you're gone

**Author's Note:**

> this is very self indulgent, and typed in a notes app, i was just having angsty fun

"Is this real?" Leia asks when she opens her eyes. They're sitting on the balcony of the royal palace in Alderaan, and the sun is warm on their backs. 

"Would it matter if it wasn't?" 

She shrugs. "Did you make this - all by yourself?" 

"Of course not," he says. She's looking at his back turned to her. He is tall and broad in the shoulders like he hasn't been before, and his voice is deep and soft. "Does that unsettle you?" 

When he turns around suddenly she is looking at a child, no older than ten, chubby soft cheeks and fragile bird limbs, unruly dark hair falling in his dark eyes. 

"How about now?" The voice cracks. "No?" The child frowns. The voice goes softer. "How about now?" He repeats. 

He's cuddling a lump of a leather jacket to his chest that she recognized as Han's.

"You can do - all this magic," Leia says, her voice cracking with the endless wonder of the Force for which she always had nothing but awe and love. "And yet you choose to be the monster." 

She regards him -this child that has manifested in front of her in her own destroyed childhood home, with all the heartbreak of a mother. 

He drops Han's jacket to the floor.  
   
"Is daddy coming back? Is daddy coming back?" He asks in his soft high-pitched child voice, an adult mockery thick and ugly in it. His chubby face thins, his hair loses its shine. 

"Your father is NEVER coming back to take you home. So be GOOD and LISTEN."   
The voice is one she painfully recognizes to be Luke's, strict and harsh. 

A bruise blossoms on the child's thinned face. 

"I will be a good boy, I'll listen I'll do everything I'l do my best." 

He extends his skinny arms and she watches them split open and bleed out with a quiet mute sort of horror with the dim awareness that all of it has happened before and she can't comfort her hold anymore.

"Yes, but you never TRIED TO!" It says angrily, stomps its foot in the pool of blood, and crimson specks fly in the beautiful sun-drenched air between them.

"I thought if I was dead or dying you'd come for me. Tell me that you loved me and this was a mistake and you're taking me back HOME AND NOW -" 

In front of her eyes he becomes a tall slender youth with a kind of grace about him that she had only seen in old holorecordings of Anakin Skywalker before he was Vader.  

He looks starved. Bruised. Tired. 

"I did everything I was told," he snarls, and his voice was so twisted and ugly she has to flinch back. 

In his hand something crimson and violent gleams to life.  
   
"I could have had any saber I wanted. But I want this one. It's broken." He makes a slashing motion in the air and she flinches. In this dream she can't look away from his hungry lean face. 

 

"They took things from us. Not just me. The other padawans too. They took, and took and took until we stopped being people and I -"

His voice cracks. The saber retracts, no longer thrumming in the air with its barely contained energy. 

"I wanted to prove that my control is so fine I could contain a weapon that combusts. And Master Luke would never let me have Grandfather's saber." 

Master, not Uncle, she noted. 

"He didn't let me call him that." 

He crosses the balcony with all the jerky grace of a teenager, puts a hand on her shoulder. 

"Look down." 

She does.

The city is bustling with life. 

"I could have been any one of them." His voice is ironic, kind. "But no - you had to. Push, and push, and - I told you. That it was bad. That I wasn't happy." 

She watches him age before her eyes until he is once more the broad tall man whose back she had seen, and then for the first time she sees her son as a grown man. He is wearing the flowing robes of a Galactic Senator from the first Republic. 

"I wanted to be so many things." He tilts his head to the side. "But you took from me. All of you just took and took and took - you and father and Snoke and Luke and the other padawans always taking and taking and taking and-" 

He is shaking but she reaches for him he flinches away abruptly. 

"I thought I was doing the right thing." She says. She may never get to say this again. She had wanted them to be happy. All of them. And for that they needed the future she was trying to secure .

"I didn't want to be happy in twenty years," Kylo whispers. 

He sits next to her on the stone bench. Takes her old hands in his own smooth young ones. 

"I wanted to be happy back then. I wanted all of us to be happy, and together, but you abandoned me."

"I failed you." She admits. "Ben -"  
   
He snarls at the use of his old dead name. 

"I am so sorry. More sorry than you will ever know." 

"Daddy is never coming back." 

She's looking at the child again, holding her hands in his. "He will never raise his voice at me again. He will never – he will never ABANDON ME ON ANOTHER PLANET IN ANOTHER SYSTEM AGAIN -" 

His shouting is almost defeaning.

"And I will never be a scholar,” he quiets down suddenly, like a storm.

He's back close to the pillar again and all the way across from her, his wine red academy student robes blowing gently in the breeze. "Or a senator. Or a pilot. Or a merchant…All this magic." He mimicks her voice. "AND I DID EVERYTHING I WAS TOLD." 

He screams it right in her face, so furious she has to lean back from him. From the sheer power that hits her square in the chest. 

"I am not a failure." He murmurs. His voice is a cold eerie whisper. That must be what Snoke sounds like. "I am a child. A good child. A loved child." He circles her slowly. "Only not by you. And not by daddy. And not by Chewie. And not by my Uncle. But somewhere in the Galaxy - someone would be proud of me -" 

"Ben. Ben stop this."

"I would never have come back. You must understand that. Not back then. Not even now."  
   
"Ben. Please. Just - a talk. Just you and me and - there need not be anymore senseless violence." 

"You HIT ME!" He spits it right in her face. All the charades are gone. The ugly truth unfolded. 

He pulls away from her. She admires him. Her child has grown into a beautiful young man. And she will never see him again. 

 

"I know.  I'm sorry." She bows her head. She truly is.   
"I know you have Armitage Hux. I know you're torturing him." 

"I am not releasing a war criminal, because you reminded me that I used to hit you-" it's her turn to snarl, stand up, get in his face which –

Splits right open and bleeds and closes into an ugly scar. 

"I don't want you to release him. I want you to kill him. Swiftly. Publically. An execution befitting the Galactic Emperor -" 

"But he is not -"

"He would have been. He could have been.  He was a good child just like me. A loved child, and he will never see his father again. And I won't see my father again. And I will not be a senator or an artist, and he will not be emperor or admiral of a fleet. So kill him quickly." 

"I don't owe him a kindness." Leia whispers. 

Her son looks at her in the backdrop of the dream's sunset. She realizes it isn't a sunset at all. It is the single suspended moment before the Death Star hits it's target. 

"You owe me a lifetime." 

She wakes up drenched in cold sweat, alone in her quarters, and she will never seen her son again. She hasn't seen him since he was a child.


End file.
